Monday, December 30, 2013

I'm here!!! Or there, I guess. The weather is fantastic: sunny and hot and blue skies and I love it! Yesterday was rough because the flight was 17 hours so I was super tired. We took a 22-passenger van (yep, they have those) to the Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre, which is a retreat place built in 1948 to be a place for whites and blacks to interact, which was illegal at the time, of course. Lots of famous Southern-Africa people have stayed/hid from the police here, including Nelson Mandela and an old president of Mozambique. It's no 5-star hotel, but I love it more. It sits at the top of a valley and you can see a town with red roofs rising up on the other side.

It's about 4:40 PM right now and we haven't done much today. It's been mainly a MOP-orientation day, so lots of sitting and talking and praying and singing, but it'sstill interesting. Tomorrow we are going to visit the Apartheid museum and a Rhino-Lion preserve, so I'm psyched. More later! And I'm so sorry for the awful photo quality; these are coming from my iPod.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Ew, packing. I've got my camera, malaria meds, and passport. Also the ornament Pastor Kevin gave me. I'll include a photo so you can see how awesome it is. It's a peace sign made of recycled aluminum from a Fair Trade artisan in South Africa. (Good find, Rev Kev!) This isn't just a post about how fantastic my ornament is: I want to say thanks. Thanks to Kevin, of course. Also to everyone who helped me financially- there's no way I could do this without you! Thanks so my teachers for being flexible and cooperative with me missing 2 weeks of school. Thanks to the Wolford-Wright clan for all the support. I wish I could have seen you more this Christmas. And I think that's all the thanks.

Now that that is out of the way... The plane leaves Burlington tomorrow at 9:30 ish. From there, I'll go to DC and then take a group flight to Dakar, Senegal. I don't know if we change planes there or not... (Can I say I've been to Senegal if I really only paused on the runway as they refueled the plane?) And then we fly to Johannesburg! I hope everything goes smoothly, with no cancelled/delayed flights. We'll see... That's it for now!